[pro] Help with Rendering GUIs from Lisp

[Matthew Swank]

I am porting the Morphic GUI tool kit, Or more specifically the subset
that is implemented in morphic.js:
http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=34.

I am a little overwhelmed by the options for rendering the GUI to screen.
The JS implementation uses html5 canvas elements where Canvases,
Images, and Contexts are rolled into or are part of the same object.

In am a relative novice in graphics programming, so it's hard for me
to differentiate among the merits of the various bindings available to
common lisp to do this.  However, using the html canvas code as
guide, I am gravitating towards some sort of high level canvas that
writes to a lower level back end (vecto -> lispbuilder-sdl, cl-cairo).

Does anyone have guidance on the best way to approach this? Should I
consider "raw" SDL surfaces, perhaps with SDL_ttf for font rendering?
Is OpenGL a reasonable option for what is essentially a 2d
environment?

Matt